Corsehill Castle

Heritage listing

Category B Date Added 14/04/1971 Supplementary Information Updated 25/08/2020 Local Authority East Ayrshire Planning Authority East Ayrshire Burgh Stewarton NGR NS 41721 46575 Coordinates 241721, 646575 — Corsehill Castle is a very ruinous mansion, on the outskirts of Stewarton. It was the seat of the family of Cunningham and was apparently on the L plan. The remains consist of a single wall fragment 5.8m long by 2.8m thick, and about 10m high, with a fireplace visible in the east side, which, considering the repairs said to have been done in 1840, bears a sufficiently close resemblance to the wall shown on the left side of Grose s illustration to confirm this as his "Corshill House". To the west of the wall is a ditch 7m wide with a maximum depth of 2.5m, and on its S are traces of another ditch about 3m wide and 1m deep, but this appears to be the remains of a track which led from the modern road on the west side of the castle to the cattle creep under the railway line on the east side, but it may have been original before it silted up. On the north of the site is a natural gully, and on the east a rock outcrop now partially covered by the railway embankment. Irregular-shaped banks, through which odd fragments of masonry protrude, are all that remain of the rest of the castle; these banks vary in height from 0.3m to 1.7m. — The map in Pont s Cuninghame of 1604-8 shows two buildings, "Reuincraige" and "Corshill", at approximately NS 417 467 and NS 422 465 respectively, and Dobie (1876) comments that the two have often been confused, but that "Reuincraig" stood on the west of the Corsehill Burn (presumably that now called Clerkland Burn) and "Corsehill Mansion" on its east. "Reuincraig", he says, was so modernised about 1840 that it was difficult to realise that it had

From Historic Environment Scotland under OGL v3.